Guest: Rojda Alak
Title of The Work: Elephant Laughter
Original Title: Fil Kahkahası
Genre: Story
“I wonder if he’s hurt.”
“There’s only one way to find out. Go and ask.”
“No, it doesn’t really matter. Never mind.”
Behind every sentence that begins with “in fact” there is a truth, Esma had realized this two years ago. Immediately after they made love, Ahmet was engrossed in the elephant patterns on the picnic and said “actually”. “You’re exactly the woman I’ve been looking for,” he continued, slowly shifting his gaze from where he was to Esma. It was at that moment that Esma’s mind was enlightened like a keyhole in the suffocation of the repetitions of “Why, why, why”. She searched for the key moment of the past four years with Ahmet in their last conversation through elephant patterns.
***
Two women smile at each other like a shadow growing in the flickering flame of candlelight. They sip their wine. Photographs of second new poets on the walls. A few lines of poetry in the black space below the photographs. Wooden tables. Wooden chairs with no cushions that make you feel numb after a while. The scent of cinnamon in the cake-like smell of boiling wine.
Esma has been coming here often since winter made itself felt. She drinks mulled wine. Sometimes she finds an empty seat around the stove on the balcony and warms herself. Since seeing her, she makes her way here, not to sit, but to say hello to a few acquaintances. Most of the people who come are more or less the same. Even the table they sit at doesn’t change. For example, he always sits on the left side, at the most secluded table against the wall. Like an old clock repairman, he leans his head on the table with his shoulders and writes something in the notebook in front of him, sometimes on a piece of paper.
“You know, trusting and believing are not the same thing,” she said. “There are many people I trust, but very few people I believe in.” Esma, tilting her head forward with interest, asks her to continue.
“You confide in someone. Sometimes you tell someone something very special to you. Things you never confessed even to yourself before. You know it will stay with him, he won’t tell anyone else. That’s trust. Believing is different.” The woman lifts her head up. She is trying to remember something or maybe looking for the right sentence. Esma adds a sip of wine to the taste of feta cheese. She carries her curiosity for the rest of the sentence in her growing pupils.
“When you believe, you know that every word you say will not only be kept but also touched with compassion and wrapped with love. What you tell will have a beautiful meaning when it passes through the mind of the other person and is put into words. It will be something brand new. This is what it means to believe.” Esma’s index finger wraps around the ceramic wine glass. Then she rested her hand on her chin. “I hadn’t thought about that, I guess you’re right,” she says and suddenly stands up. She walks to the table by the wall. The woman watches Esma. She smiles.
“Did you just resent me,” she says to the man at the table. The man lifts his head slightly and looks at Esma. “On the contrary.” He touches the orange hairs on the chin of his black beard like a stain. He closes the notebook in front of him. His hand again went straight to the orange in his beard.
“What does the opposite mean?” said Esma.
The man points to the notebook on the table. “Not now, I’ll tell you later.”
“Okay,” Esma said, not knowing what to say. The man bent over his notebook again. Just as Esma was about to walk away, he suddenly said something she hadn’t even thought of, “Then it’s already happened, go ahead and say it.” Her lips waited at the opening of the last syllable.
“I’ll tell you when I’m done writing,” he said confidently. There is no emphasis in his voice.
“You couldn’t resist, could you,” his friend said with the same smile when he returned to the table. Esma is at the table looking for something to hold in her hand. Her face is tense. “I think I like him, Neval.” The woman is surprised. “I can’t imagine the two of you together.” “No, actually it’s the opposite, I can imagine myself with him very well. It’s as if he’s been thrown from centuries ago into the present and doesn’t care about connecting with the present. The expression on his face is frozen in time. In fact, it is as if he has just shaken off the soil. If I smell it, I will feel the smell of fresh earth.” Esma sees the harshness in her voice on Neval’s face. She gently took her hands off the table and put them on her lap. “You know, you always wear this cardigan,” she said. Neval turns and looks at him out of the corner of her eye. He looks at the dark, shabby cardigan that covers his mustard-colored bell-bottom corduroy trousers up to his knees. The edges are creased and the pockets are sagging. Esma continues her speech without realizing that Neval is watching her. “Then I like the way his hair and beard are all tangled together, all this carelessness.”
Neval interrupted Esma’s speech. “He is packing his things, I think he will get up.” Esma jumped up and cut him off.
“Are you leaving?”
“I’m going for a walk, I have a headache.”
Esma opened her palm and held it out. No, she hadn’t planned this either, she just did it. “If you didn’t tell me, then write it down.”
The man liked it. As if this was the only moment he couldn’t say “later”, he decisively took a pen out of his bag. He writes something on Esma’s palm. Esma looks at her palm, surprised. Is this a coincidence, her favorite… “Goodbye,” he says. Esma takes his outstretched hand for a handshake. She asks for the pen. She is writing too. The man couldn’t see in the dim light, so he held his hand to the candlelight on the table. Esma is watching him. She smiles. The man said, “You have a nice smile”. She leaves.
When he returns to the table, he opens his palm and shows it. Neval squints and tries to read it.
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. We’ll find out.”
“Can you wait for tomorrow? It’s late.”
“We won’t wait for tomorrow because I have it”
“What did you write?”
“Guess.”
“It’s very difficult, but I wouldn’t write anything, I’d say let’s talk. What’s the need for such riddles?”
“Wouldn’t that be too fast? I don’t want to startle him.”
“Actually it’s the other way around”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe you’re the one who’s scared, maybe it’s the truth. Thinking about what you went through with Ahmet…”
“What’s that got to do with it, Ahmet was sick. Months later, when he shaved his hair, beard and eyebrows and disappeared, he wrote to me that he was bipolar, you know”
“Yes, but isn’t it strange that you realized it months later when he told you, Esma?”
“I think we should get up tonight before it gets any weirder. And please don’t bring up Ahmet again.”
Neval drank the rest of the wine in one gulp. He slammed the glass down hard on the table. He reached for his coat. “Don’t do this,” Esma said. She looked at him sideways. “I’m not doing anything, let’s get up, shall we?”
***
The man opens his palm again under the street lamp. He looks at Esma’s writing. Snowflakes bleed the ink on his palm. He takes out a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully dries the ink. He walks leaving his footprints in the first snow of winter.
***
As soon as Esma arrived home, she reached for her bookshelf. She took the thick red-covered book from the shelf. She opened the page written in her palm. That paragraph read as follows.
“If you are going to forget me one day, if you are going to leave me one day, don’t tire me in vain, don’t take me out of my cave in vain. Don’t make me lose my habits, especially my habit of loneliness. Don’t make me uneasy…”
Esma reread these lines that she had once underlined.
They slept the same sleep in their rooms on distant streets of the same city, embracing all the possibilities of happiness. Esma and the man.
They will meet today at the same time and place he wrote on her palm. Esma went first. She inhales the scent of cinnamon that permeates the palace on the ceiling. The faint candlelight on the tables is blurred like a halo on a cloudy night. She chose a table where she could see him coming. She ordered two mulled wines. She took a notebook and some colored pencils. As a gift. She’ll ask him about those notebooks where he sat and wrote for hours. The day they met – it was a coincidence, they sat next to each other around the stove – he gave Esma a quince cooked on the stove. Then he handed her his wine. They had chatted for a while. “If people had two lives, I would have thought that I met you in my previous life, that we were even very close. You are so familiar that it seems strange to me,” she said and left.
Neval wrote a message “I wondered if he came, did you meet, write me.” He looks at the clock, it’s been half an hour, he touches the glass, it’s already cold. He doesn’t want to answer. If he says “No, he hasn’t come yet”, Neval will definitely say something negative, he will get upset for no reason. He looks excitedly at every shadow that appears at the door. He greets a few acquaintances from afar. They point to their table and say “come”. She points to the chair opposite her and says, “She will come.”
The man watches Esma from the threshold. His hands are in his pockets. He turns back and walks away.
What if he doesn’t come? What if he is really scared. He’s thinking about what it says in the book. Otherwise it means… Of course. How could I not think of it? He’s saying, “Leave me alone, I’m fine. He’s hiding his cowardice under that forlorn look. But he said your smile was beautiful. He liked it when I wrote on his palm. He writes a message to Neval.
At that moment, a man they often meet at the venue sits in the empty chair opposite Esma. Esma doesn’t like this man. She speaks in short sentences. “I’m waiting for someone. Thank you.” is the longest sentence she says to him. “Forget it, it’s not for you anyway. Get out now and come to me,” Neval wrote. The message is familiar to him. He feels himself in a repetition. It is as if he has seen the same dream again. Elephant patterns flash before Esma’s eyes. She packs her bag. She will get up. Her lips tremble. She becomes tearful. She feels as if she has been wronged. As he puts his arm through his coat, he feels a tall, imposing shadow looming over him. He smells the smell of warm bread. The other sleeve of his coat is empty. He turns and looks. First he sees the steaming hot bread in his hand. Then Sencer. Then the cardigan. Then the elephant pattern on the cardigan. Two elephants, exactly on either side of the cardigan. He marvels that he had not noticed this before. The elephant’s trunk, twisted and turned inward, starts to move. Sencer shows Esma the bread in his hand. The trunks loosen and lengthen. “You laughed so well again,” says Sencer. The elephant’s trunk gets caught on the button of the cardigan. Esma is scared. Would anyone laugh because they are scared? She thinks of hiding under the table. The elephant’s trunk on the right catches her. Sencer doesn’t understand why Esma is laughing. Esma shouts in the damp darkness inside her. “It’s not me laughing, it’s the elephants”
